


I Was A Fool

by aslightstep



Series: Drabblethon 600 [19]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Breaking Up & Making Up, Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Fix-It, M/M, Not Iron Man 3 Compliant, relationships are hard, they're even harder when you're steve and tony
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-19 14:58:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11315796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aslightstep/pseuds/aslightstep
Summary: Or: the five times Steve and Tony saved each other, and the one time they didn't.





	I Was A Fool

**Author's Note:**

> for anon who asked: Steve/Tony, post-CW or CW-compliant would be preferable, but an AU is fine. 
> 
> Tony and Pepper were never in a relationship, and Iron Man 3 didn't happen. Roll with it.

_1\. (Do you remember I searched you out? How I climbed your city walls.)_

Tony watches him at the railing for a long time, one hand wrapped around the tumbler of whiskey and one hand half reaching for the panel that would open the sliding doors leading outside. “How long has he been out there, J?” he asks softly.

There’s something about the angle of Steve’s body as he leans over the railing. Something about the curve of his neck as he stares down at the street. Something about the arch of his feet, neither planted on the ground. Unsteady, the engineer in him thinks. Ready to fall-

“Two hours, sir,” JARVIS answers, and Tony thinks of the two hours he’s just spent in his bed, waking up from nightmare after nightmare, waking up and drifting off until they all became one big long terror.

He had given up and headed for the nearest source of alcohol when he saw Steve standing at the ledge of the balcony, leaning. The light of the moon and the city have washed him out, the gold of his hair gone silver and his pale skin gone white. He looks like a statue. Screw it, he thinks, and heads outside.

Steve must hear the door hiss, throwing a cursory glance over his shoulder and tensing when he sees Tony. They still haven’t quite managed to get along, even after the epic bonding experience that was an alien invasion. “Late night or early morning for you?” he asks gruffly.

“I like that you think I went to bed at all,” Tony quips, wondering at the strangely coaxing tone to his voice. “What about you, Cap? This isn’t cramping into your five AM wake up call?”

Steve shrugs. “Thought I might skip it.”

There’s another joke on the edge of his tongue, but instead Tony just wanders over until he’s right beside Cap. He sees blue eyes flicker down to his glass and then back up, but Steve says nothing, which leaves him oddly disappointed. Not like he had wanted someone to be here in the communal floor when there was a bottle of Jack in the workshop, not like he wanted someone to look at him and say oh, Tony, you don’t need that. It might have been nice though, just to hear. 

Leaving the talking to Tony, then. That’s okay. Tony can do talking.

“Lot has changed, I bet,” he says, gesturing out to the city. 

“Well,” Steve says, clearing his throat when the one word comes out choked. “I never much had the chance to see it from this view.”

“Still, doesn’t mean you don’t-” Tony says, because he is good at talking, but he is not good at knowing where and what not to talk about. “What are you doing out here, anyway?”

“Like you said. A lot has changed.” It doesn’t sound agreeable, or even kind. It’s miserable, Steve’s voice, and angry. 

“I figure building’s are the least of your worries there, Cap,” Tony says.

Steve is quiet for a long moment. “You’re probably right. I just - remember things a lot differently. Sometimes I have to remind myself that it isn’t…like that anymore.”

“How well do you remember it?”

“Perfectly,” Steve whispers. Then, to Tony: “I always had a good memory, but after the serum-”

“Photographic,” Tony finishes. He takes a swallow of his drink and lets it burn all the way down, finds his lips curling up against his will. “Sucks, doesn’t it?”

“What?” Steve says, looking at him for the first time. 

Tony tries to smooth out his sneer into something normal, something not so bitter. Tries not to show Yinsen’s body going slack or the dark of space or the ripples of water as he drowned over and over in his face. “I mean. Useful, right? It’s useful. Plans, schematics, there at the back of your mind forever, but sometimes. Not so good.”

He thinks Steve sees it all in his face anyway, because his eyes go a little soft and more than a little pained. “Yeah,” he says. “Sometimes.” And Steve’s seen friends slip between his fingers, too. Steve’s seen death, too.

“Sometimes I have nightmares,” Tony says out to the sky. “But. They’re just memories.”

Steve shifts a little closer. “Yeah,” the soldier agrees again. Then, seemingly apropos of nothing: “I hate the cold.”

“I wish you had a glass so I could toast to that. Deserts are fucking freezing at night.” Not as cold as, oh, being frozen alive, but still. “Water. On my face.”

“The window broke first thing on the plane,” Steve agrees, and this conversation of half-filled fears is less gruesome than it has any right to be. Tony almost finds himself smiling in the brief seconds he isn’t wondering what the hell Fury was thinking, putting this team together. The Island of Misfit Toys was a part of fiction for a reason.

“You know,” he says. “It’s not all gone.” When Steve raises an eyebrow, he gestures out at the city. “New Yorkers are nostalgia-ridden fools, near as I can tell. Never tear anything down. They just built around it. Or on top, more likely, I guess, there’s not just excessive amounts of space here. But they make something new of out it. The old, I mean.”

Steve looks at him for a long time, then back out at the city. “You figure?”

“Yeah, sure,” Tony says. “I mean, c’mon, you know better than me. The Chrysler Building. And that one over there-”

“It was there, back then-”

“Yeah, so, and it’s still there, but look at that line there, they added on, brand spanking new. Hey, come here, sit down with me, I’m getting creaky in my old age-”

“So dramatic,” Steve huffs, but he releases his death grip on the railing and they sit, legs through the slots as they look out at the city, still looking at building. “It was an insurance company in my day.”

“Cell phones now,” Tony corrects, and Steve looks at him dubiously, and they’re off, cataloging the differences, the similarities, and he never thought of using buildings as metaphors - left that up to architects who waxed philosophic about arches and singers who sang uncomfortably intimate songs about their hometowns - but it seems to be working now so he sticks with it.

Tony puts his drink down. When he and Steve are finally through talking, barely getting words through their yawns, he stands, leaving it out there, completely forgotten.

 

_2\. (Do you remember me as devout? How I prayed for your calls.)_

Steve sometimes has this picture of Fury. The director is sitting at his desk, looming over a puzzle, working on fitting the pieces together. He does so, but the puzzle has no color. No picture. The pieces fit, shoved together, interlocking like they were made to, but the it’s still just a group of pieces. There’s no story. No whole.

Sometimes, that’s what the Avengers feel like to him. This group that he’s supposed to wrangle together and make into Earth’s mightiest heroes, that fights together like a well-oiled machine, like Fury’s perfect puzzle, and then goes home and separates. Broken, he thinks. Clarifies _no_ , broken _apart_.

There’s something growing here, in Natasha’s miniscule smiles and the easy line of Clint’s shoulders and Thor’s embraces, just a smidgen hesitant; in Bruce’s shy offers of dinner. There’s something in the way Tony looks at him over the glow of his holographic work stations, something in the easy way that Tony fights at his back.

(Something in the way that Steve looks back. That Captain America is always at Iron Man’s side.)

It grows, slowly, over time. The picture forms of them, together, a team and a family, together. He wants them to stay, he realizes fiercely. He doesn’t want to be alone. He dreams about loses them, about waking up in a world without the ones he loves all over again. He’d do anything to stop that. Anything not to live through it again.

And he supposes, if he’s honest with himself, it’s why he takes it so hard when someone tries to take Tony away. Even if that someone is occasionally Tony himself.

“Oh, stop with the sad eyes,” Tony is telling him as Steve stares down at him from where he has slumped over Tony, boxing him in on the lab table Steve had laid him out on when he had to exchange the arc reactors. “You saved me. All better now.” He taps the new arc for good measure, and hands the old one - the one that he sacrificed to jumpstart the machine that would fry all the mechanical beasts that attacked New York City today - off to DUM-E to be incinerated.

“You nearly died,” Steve gasps. He can’t catch a breath, he can’t stop looking at Tony’s lips, the color coming back to them, such a relief after the way he had watched them turn gray as Tony died, _Tony was dying_ , he nearly lost him-

“I did what I had to,” Tony says softly, because they have had this conversation more than once. Steve is not one to cast stones at Tony’s maverick tendencies in battle but there had been an adjustment period in the beginning, Tony not used to a team and Steve not used to hyper strong flying battle suits armed with missiles fighting with him. 

“In my arms,” Steve mumbles. “Through my fingers…”

And Tony has always been so good at picking up Steve’s dropped cues, filling in the blanks he leaves all over his life. “But you saved me. Just like I knew you would.”

“Tony, you can’t just-” Leave me, he doesn’t say. “If I wasn’t fast enough, or if your heart had given out sooner-”

“But it didn’t,” Tony insists. “It happened, we fixed it, it’s over. Steve,” and he sits up inside the circle of Steve’s arms and he’s so close and all Steve can think of is to drag him closer, so he does. Tony is so warm against, so soft. So _breakable_. “We all came home today.”

They did. The team is safe, the city is saved. Even Bucky, wherever he is, is most likely safe. It’s been a good day, he should be relieved. But all he can think about is how unfocused Tony’s eyes went, how Tony never looks like that. He wants to _stay_ , he thinks to himself. And he wants Tony there with him.

“You with me?” Tony murmurs from where Steve has let him tuck his head into his shoulder. 

“Warning,” Steve finally manages. His fingers are on Tony’s neck, feeling his pulse and pulling him closer, never close enough. “Next time you pull a stunt like that, I want a warning.”

“Can do, boss man,” Tony says on a laugh. “Poor planning on my part, I’ll admit it.” He pulls away, looks up at Steve. “Sorry,” he murmurs, and at first Steve thinks he means for today, but then Tony’s lips are on his, pressing gently, and everything flies away.

He likes looking at Tony. He likes listening to Tony. He likes watching him work and scheme and laugh and he’s even fond of his irritating lack of filter and the fact that he is allergic to sleep. But he doesn’t love Tony, not like Peggy. 

But God, does this feel right, Tony alive under his hands, the faintest hint of a pulse in Tony’s lips where they meet Steve. It feels right when he kisses back. Together, he thinks, or not at all. “Don’t be,” he whispers back, and Tony’s lips curve against his.

Much later, the kissing grows more fervent, and they wind up on a couch, Tony in his lap making all kinds of delightful noises, and Steve is so happy and _so scared_.

“Don’t leave me,” he whispers into Tony’s hair as the man trails kisses down his neck, lips trailing over the pulse beating double time in his neck over and over, a point of fascination for Tony. 

“I won’t, I won’t,” Tony promises against his skin. “I’m right here, champ. We’ll both - yes please that _again_ \- we’ll both agree to turn down the theatrics, alright? We’ll both come home every day. To - oh - to each other. And do this all over again.”

Tony’s hand are so tight around his arms. He tries to focus on that, on the feel of them, on Tony’s back muscles moving under his fingers. But he’s floating somewhere, or sinking down, to wherever Bucky hides now, wherever Peggy’s mind goes, wherever Dum Dum and Morita and Phillips went after they passed. Steve never keeps anything good. “Don’t leave me,” he repeats. “Don’t.”

He doesn’t love Tony, but here, underneath his hands, breathing and alive, is where Tony belongs. He’ll do anything to keep it that way, even something as terrifying as falling in love all over again. Tony promises again, and Steve believes him, dragging Tony back up again to lay kisses against the words spilling out of that mouth.

(And he would tell him. He would show Tony what Zola showed him. But he doesn’t _know_ , not for sure. It’s just a suspicion. And if he tells Tony, he could lose him, and Tony could take Bucky with him. 

And maybe that makes him selfish, maybe he’s a coward, but this way nobody hurts. This way nobody’s left alone.)

 

 _3._ _(But stand still is all I ever did.)_

Tony doesn’t love Steve when he finds him in the hospital after the destruction of the helicarriers, carrying his shield, recently rescued from the Potomac.

He admires that Steve’s hair is still golden even in the sickly hospital light, he treasures the steady beep of his heartbeat on the monitor, and he smiles when Steve wakes up and those big blue eyes find his. 

“Enjoy your Cap nap?” he asks, and Steve groans theatrically at the terrible joke. 

“Changed my mind. Throw me back into the river. Put me out of my misery.”

“Uh, no. I don’t think even your immune system can take another dip in there.” Steve does that funny little crooked grin he does that Tony used to want to run his fingers along just to straighten and now just wants to run his fingers along. He coughs, looks down. He doesn’t love Steve, but he loves him enough, if that will ever make sense. Enough to take his own dip in the Potomac. “I got you something.”

“You didn’t have to,” Steve says automatically, but his mouth clicks shut as Tony brings up the shield and places it over his lap. 

Tony watches Steve, watching the emotions flit across his face. Shock and happiness and unmistakable fear. “Just a present, Steve. No pressure,” he murmurs, and Steve frowns at them both, him and the shield. “I heard what happened. With Barnes.” 

There’s a question hanging at the end of that sentence, but Tony will never voice it, and Steve doesn’t hear it.

“If you need help looking-”

“Thank you,” Steve whispers. He reaches out, wraps a hand around the edge of the shield. “You didn’t have to.”

“Only if I wanted Howard to rise from his grave and strangle me,” Tony jokes, startled a bit when Steve suddenly goes tense, his grip white-knuckled around the shield.

“I didn’t feel right without it,” Steve says, and though the subject is the same the change in tone still seems abrupt. “Like part of me was missing, too. I - thank you for saving it, Tony, really.”

Tony inexplicably finds himself blushing. “It was nothing,” he mutters, then moves to stand. “Well. To your speedy recovery, then, Cap-”

“You’re leaving?”

“My presence is not usually conducive to speedy recoveries.”

“Bull,” Steve declares, settling back. “I feel better already.” And yeah, Steve could probably use some mindless chatter right now. A distraction, a past time, until the world starts moving again. Tony stays. He’s has got a million things to do back home, but he stays.

“So, I hear thanks are in order for saving my life, by the way…”

He doesn’t love Steve when he comes back, fresh and uninjured and taking up space on the floor below Tony’s in the Tower. He loves his companionship, loves his humor, loves the pranks he’s brave enough to play on Natasha, but he doesn’t love him.

He doesn’t love Steve while he’s away, on a mission or after Barnes. He misses him, designs fretfully on the offchance that whatever he’s sent Steve out there with fails, and even admits to himself the streak of jealousy that arises for Steve’s single-minded focus on Barnes.

He doesn’t even love him when they kiss for the first time. Part of that might be the fact that his chest is still on fire and Steve’s cheeks are still a little wet. Part of it might be the fact that he knows he and Steve are broken, that this might be the worst thing that will happen to either of them.

 _Why did you let yourself fall?_ he didn’t ask at the hospital, because he already knew the answer. Same reason he gave his address to a terrorist, probably, or the reason why he sometimes sees himself steering towards the ground when he’s flying the suit. You _want it_ to stop, and it’s _going_ to stop, and those two things aren’t always the same, so might as well end it on your own terms, right?

He doesn’t love him, but he could, God, he could. He could break him to smithereens, or he could love him, or he could do both and destroy everything, but Tony Stark is not afraid, or at least that’s what he tells the mirror every morning.

Steve kisses him back, and he thinks maybe he could tell Steve instead. Steve is more than enough to help him believe it. Because Steve is good, and brave, and so much better than Tony.

Still, he doesn’t love Steve right up until the moment that Steve finds him hiding in his Tower workshop a month after he left him at the new compound with the recruits. They’ve been chatting by phone, keeping each other updated while Tony tries to handle the fact that he built the very thing he was trying to prevent and Steve tries to deal with the fact that Tony didn’t tell him about it.

Tony barely gets out a hello when Steve hefts something up onto the lab table and almost reverently puts it down, stepping back and looking at Tony expectantly. It’s one of his old suitcase armors, the only armor left now. It must have gotten lost in Steve’s stuff ages ago, and it’s caked with dust and grease.

“What is this?” Tony asks suspiciously as Steve rounds the table to slide in behind him, arms wrapping around his waist.

“To your speedy recovery,” Steve says into his ear before dropping a kiss right above it, and Tony stares at the armor and does not cry.

 _Like part of me was missing_ , Steve had said a year ago. Tony knows the feeling. 

“I don’t know if I can-” Tony cuts himself off, and Steve’s arms move until big hands are cupping, wrapping around his own.

“No pressure,” is the reply. “But. I think you can. For what it’s worth.”

It’s worth everything, because Tony _loves_ Steve, and Tony is a _moron_ , and has loved him this entire time. He wants to tell him, but all that comes out when he turns and throws his arms around his boyfriend’s shoulders is “Captain America, always saving the day.”

He will. Someday. Soon. They have time now; he figures they’ve beaten the odds, two broken souls fitting together just right. All those dreaded maybes slink off to the back of his mind to die a quiet death. Steve is the best thing that has ever happened to him.

 

[ **0\. (I was a fool for love.)**

The shield crunches through the fiberglass of the arc reactor as Steve twists it hard. Tony hands are above his face, still bracing for a blow, and Steve keeps catching glimpses of wide, terrified, furious brown eyes through the fingers of the gauntlet.

(‘Don’t leave me,’ he had asked, and Tony had promised, and Tony had kept it in the end.) 

The reactor goes out. Tony drops his hands. Everything is red and dark and cold and Steve is so tired. He waits for Tony to speak, because this is his half-dropped cue, the one that Tony always picks up. But Tony stares up at him, so indescribably hurt.

He wants to fill the silence for him; Tony and Steve, that’s what they do, they pick up the slack for the other. He’s going to open his mouth and say Tony, I love you, I’m sorry, Tony, I was wrong I never meant for it to get this far and I wanted to save you, I wanted to keep you safe, I wanted to _keep you_ -

Bucky groans, somewhere to his left. Steve stays silent and Tony, who had tried to murder Bucky, now seems completely unconcerned with him. His eyes are fixed on Steve, big and bright. _Last chance._ Open your mouth, Rogers. Say it, for once in your life, say it before it’s too late.

But what would that do, he wonders, staring back at Tony, but hurt him even more? 

Steve has always lost things when he was a kid, always scrounged and scraped by for his next paycheck, next meal, next breath. He’d never gotten to keep much, even after the serum. He saves what he can, where he can, and he holds it close, because everything else slips away. 

So Steve stands and walks to Bucky. Pulls him up and shoulders the burden, begins the long walk out, when he hears scraping behind him, a sharp inhale. Tony, picking up the cue. He pauses.

“That shield doesn’t belong to you,” Tony growls, and Steve’s heart breaks. “You don’t deserve it.” _A part of me_ , he had once called that shield, and he had known Tony had understood him completely.

Later he sends a letter that goes unanswered and a phone that’s twin never rings and Steve wonders if Tony might hate him less if he hadn’t dropped it. Later, Bucky puts himself into stasis and all three of them are alone. He remembers how this used to be his worst nightmare. 

He’s glad he never told Tony he loved him and he’s glad he never heard Tony say it back. And that’s so cheap, that’s all surface, because Steve knows the truth and it is damn near time he stopped lying to himself. He loved Tony, and Tony loved him, and that’s how they broke each other.

Months later, almost a year, he’ll be caught with Sam and Clint in Western Europe and they’ll be brought before the United Nations to be tried for violations against the new Avengers’ Accords and several sovereign states. Tony arrives at some point before the trial, Rhodey at one shoulder and Vision at the other, and watches him with the same wide dark eyes Steve dreams about on the nights he can sleep. Steve hopes for one wild moment that Tony is here to help them like he once swore to do in a Berlin conference room.

(’I will,’ Tony had responded to Steve’s pleas, on an even earlier occasion. Tony had promised.)

Tony turns away.]

 

_4\. (If you’re worried that I might have changed, left behind all of my foolish ways…)_

The trial is an open and shut case because it turns out it’s really hard to prosecute people for breaking laws that never actually went into effect anyway, and Steve and his buddies walk within the week. Someone delivers the new Accords to them; he doesn’t know who, maybe Natasha. Tony genuinely doesn’t give a fuck. To say that he has _survived_ without Steve is true, to say he has _lived_ is pushing it, to say he has _thrived_ is a bald faced lie, but what no one can argue, is that Tony has _persevered_.

He always has, through the death of his parents, Obie’s betrayal, his own many brushes with death and his lingering issues over the nightmares those produced. He looks in the mirror every day and tells himself that he has lived through so much worse than Steve before. 

(The best lies are always half-truths, and Tony Stark has always been the best liar.)

He finds three signed copies of the Accords on his desk, as well as a transfer request for S. Wilson, C. Barton, and S. Rogers. He grants before he can think, and watches through the security cams three days later as the men move back into the compound. 

He stays ensconced in his lab, working on SI projects or updates to the armor or building up his secret armory in the basement for a threat that looms large in his mind and nowhere else. He sees Steve looking up at the cameras sometimes, mouthing words that Tony doesn’t puzzle out. He knows the man asks about him sometimes and FRIDAY has full permission to give him updates, because he remembers what killed him most during the fighting was the uncertainty, the not knowing if Steve was okay. He may be angry, but Tony Stark is capable of empathy sometimes.

He lives through this, too.

It doesn’t last, of course. Thor comes back with Bruce in tow, shouting ‘the aliens are coming!’ like Sci-Fi Paul Revere and in between sick vindication and abject panic Tony finds himself suddenly thrown at Steve, being expected to lead a team with a man he barely trusts.

Steve tries to talk to him, more than once, but sometimes his conversations start with “Bucky needed me-” or “Bucky had no one-” And all Tony can think, the thing that he eventually screams at Steve is: “ _Jesus Christ_ , do you think you’re the only one who’s ever loved somebody?”

Because it wasn’t about Bucky then, and it isn’t about Bucky now, and Tony understands how he might have given that impression what with trying to kill the man, and that’s on him, but he hates that after all this time, Bucky is still the only thing Steve can see. He hates that Bucky was the only thing Steve chose to hang onto. He hates that he was sacrificed on the altar of Bucky Barnes, but he gets it. If it was Rhodey he would have done the same thing, which is why psychiatric help for Barnes was the first thing he offered Steve when he could. Bucky isn’t the problem here.

They fight, more often than not, Steve vacillating wildly between apologetic  and defensive. He stands his ground, always, and it used to impress the hell out of Tony but now all he can see is curled fists and a jutting, clenched jaw and sparking eyes and he’s scared, of course he is, the bruises Steve left didn’t fade for months, but more than that: this is the little guy coming out in Steve, the one who stood up to bullies, the one who Steve himself had written a letter to Tony telling him that he had no one.

 _That’s_ the problem.

Because yes, he’s incredibly angry Steve lied to him about his _dead parents_ , a fact that explains thoroughly to Steve-

(”Those were my parents,” Tony said, deadly quiet. “That was my family. My history. It had nothing to do with you but you took it anyway. Do you get that, do you understand? They were my parents. Mine. They belonged to me like I did them and you _took them away from me!_ ” 

It had sounded like everything the newspapers ever accused him of, narcissism and ego and vanity, but how else could Tony properly express how violated he felt sometimes, thinking of all those night he laid in Steve’s arms while all the while Steve knew?)

-but he knows that if he tried, he could get through that with Steve. Steve could even help him carry that burden, throw back a drink with him for Howard and listen to him talk about Maria for hours.

Tony already has the what. It’s the why that has slowly eaten everything away.

One day a fight is too much, or goes on too long, and they’re both exhausted and inches away from each other and Steve’s chin goes up and Tony slips. “Why were you so scared of me?” he asks, like he’s been dying to for months. Steve’s eyes widen.

“What?”

Tony panics, but there’s no way to take something like that back. “It’s not just my parents. You didn’t tell me about Zemo, either, until it was too late. You were scared of my reaction, weren’t you?” Steve says nothing, eyes still like saucers and Tony closes his eyes. “I just want to know why. What did I do to make you-”

There are arms around him the next moment, the first time they’ve touched in nearly two years, and Tony sags inside them. He just wants to know, honestly. Then maybe he can let this go. 

“Please stop talking,” Steve says, and Tony laughs because they’re both so shit at this. “It wasn’t - you didn’t do anything. It was all me.”

“You were afraid I would go after Bucky,” Tony says. “That’s why you stayed quiet.”

“I wanted.” Steve takes a shuddering breath that shivers down Tony’s own spine. “ _You_. I can’t explain what that really means. I lost everything from before. But I suddenly had you. And I would have done anything to keep you. I was - I was the one that was scared, Tony.”

And Tony has always known that Steve was - is - not stitched up quite right. Botched jobs, half-finished ones still bleeding all over the place. Tony isn’t quite healed up either. And he remembers, painfully acute, not telling Steve about Ultron because he couldn’t even bear the thought of pushing him away.

Neither one of them had ever trusted the other to stay.

Now he knows the truth. And as he sees it, there are two options. He can keep being angry, and they can stay like this forever until Tony’s prophecy comes true and they destroy each other. Or he can let it go. Forgive Steve and forgive himself, and fight for the relationship he always wanted with the man he loves.

He knows what he’d choose, every time. He also knows he can’t do this without Steve.   

“We can’t be like this anymore,” he breathes into Steve’s shoulder. “We’re gonna get each other killed.”

“’M sorry,” Steve murmurs into his hair. Tony echoes him, finally wrapping his arms around Steve.

“You know we can’t go back,” Tony whispers. Steve stiffens in his arms, and then relaxes all at once like a great weight has been lifted off of him.

“I don’t think I want to,” he answers. “But I - I have to say it, okay? I did love you. I do, still. I always will.”

The words sink in, and they’re not the surprise Tony expected them to be. It was never love that was the problem between them, and love is not what needs fixing. “I love you, too.”

Love isn’t enough for people like them. Trust, openness, comfort, that’s what they need and never had. But love - love is more than enough to build on.

There is the beginning of a hesitant, cautious smile on Steve’s face that Tony feels himself returning. Like the old man said: Together.

 

_5\. (…you best be looking for somebody else without a foolish heart.)_

It takes time, effort, and more than a few skirmishes with Thanos’ forward scouts, but he and Tony stop fighting each other and begin fighting side by side.

“Oh, I’ll always be right here,” Tony says, sarcastically cheerful when Steve turns to find him mowing down a line of Chitauri. “Right by your side. Even if it kills me.” The last bit is delivered in a grumble, because everything is still not fixed and some days are hard for both of them. But they are getting better. Steve stands at Tony’s back on the battlefield and knows he is right where he belongs. He’s determined to never forget it again.

There comes a fight where Tony lands in front of him, repulsors up, and Steve doesn’t think for a moment, just puts the shield up and redirects the blasts to the enemies around him like they did their very first battle. When the area is clear and he lowers the shield, Tony’s faceplate is up and the man inside the armor is staring at him with something akin to wonder. 

It doesn’t snap everything magically back into place, but then again they don’t want to go back. They don’t kiss; they are explicitly not a couple, although lately the word ‘yet’ has been thrown around an awful lot whenever they repeat the denials to their friends. The kind of forgiveness, love, and trust that they are cultivating takes time. 

Sam snorts a laugh at that. “And of course you choose to take this time in the middle of an alien invasion.”

“Gives us something to look forward to when we win,” Steve shoots back.

They’re not a couple, but they exchange ‘I love you’s often. And every time, Steve feels something strengthen within him. Figuring out how to love Tony without the oppressive need to keep him safe and keep him at his side, trimming back his emotions when they teeter on the edge of obsession is one of the hardest things he’s ever had to do, but one of the most rewarding. Tony, too, no longer looks at him the way he always used to, that shining awe edged with self-loathing and trepidation. It’s replaced with something much softer, more real. 

(”I used to think I was going to destroy you,” Tony had whispered to him one night. “I’d tell myself that I couldn’t possibly.”

“You could now,” Steve confessed. “But I trust you not to.”

“Now that’s true love,” Tony joked, but they both knew how right he was.)

He used to be so scared of loving Tony, because loving meant leaving. It had always felt a little like a poison, slowly eating away at him. He’s still scared; he wakes up some days and can’t get out of bed for hours at just the idea that Tony won’t smile at him if they see each other at breakfast, just like there are times when Tony won’t see him because that day he’s angry all over again at Steve and he doesn’t want it spilling out, doesn’t think it’s fair when he’s given Steve his forgiveness.

But they’re getting better at pushing through. On those mornings, Steve will call Tony to come to him, and he always does. On those days, Tony will ask Steve to wait for him, and he always does. 

Tony may leave him, but he always comes back to him, too.

They move back into the Tower, where it’s easier to be on call for any major attacks. He finds Tony out on the balcony late one night, sitting against the railing, his legs poking through the slats. Steve joins him and they smile at each other, silently reminiscing.

Until Tony looks over, huffs, and says “fucking metaphors.” Steve frowns, puzzled until he follows Tony’s gaze to an old building - the insurance-cum-cellphone company. It was obviously damaged in the last attack; it’s covered in scaffolding and a large sign that says ‘UNDER CONSTRUCTION; REOPENING SOON.’

The image, combined with the old memory of Tony using the building as an example of the past being brought into the future, not being destroyed by it, makes Steve laugh at his words.

“Rebuilding,” he guesses, and Tony rolls fond eyes at him.

“On top of the old,” Tony grouses, and Steve slings an arm around him to drag him close, pressing a kiss to his temple. 

“Making it better,” Steve says, and the next time he leans in Tony turns his head, catching him in their new first kiss.


End file.
